Some Yale University students are demanding changes to the English Department curriculum: specifically, they don’t think it should feature so many English poets who were straight, white, wealthy, and male.

“It is your responsibility as educators to listen to student voices,” the students wrote in a petition to the faculty. “We have spoken. We are speaking. Pay attention.”

The “Major English Poets” sequence, a mandatory two-course commitment for English majors, is particularly problematic, according to the students. These classes cover Geoffrey Chaucer, Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, John Donne, John Milton, Alexander Pope, William Wordsworth, and T.S. Eliot. It’s not the most diverse line up, to be sure, but it’s the one that best reflects history the way it actually happened. Inarguably, these are the most influential poets in the English language.

But students think this sequence “creates a culture that is hostile to students of color.”

Shriek the students:

When students are made to feel so alienated that they get up and leave the room, or get up and leave the major, something is wrong. The English department loses out when talented students engaged in literary and cultural analysis are driven away from the major. Students who continue on after taking the introductory sequence are ill-prepared to take higher-level courses relating to race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, nationality, ability, or even to engage with critical theory or secondary scholarship. We ask that Major English Poets be abolished, and that the pre-1800/1900 requirements be refocused to deliberately include literatures relating to gender, race, sexuality, ableism, and ethnicity.

English literature isn’t about English literature. It is about the same thing everything else is about: ramming leftist ideology down people’s throats.

For the past 3,000 years, most significant accomplishments have been the work of heterosexual white males. That is the pretext for erasing these accomplishments. Then the progressive masterminds will have a blank slate upon which to impose their utopia.

29 Responses to “Yale Students Demand That Major English Poets Be Abolished for Being Heterosexual White Males”

Students who continue on after taking the introductory sequence are
ill-prepared to take higher-level courses relating to race, gender,
sexuality, ethnicity, nationality, ability, or even to engage with
critical theory or secondary scholarship.

Let them have their way, classes will soon consist of this:
“John Smith of East Latham, England was a gay, black poet who lived from 1940 to 1998. He converted to islam late in life and changed his name to Jamal Mohamed Smith.
“Smith’s most famous work was ‘There once was a lady from Japor’.
“Class dismissed.”

Funny how materialism (Marxism) and sex drive the progressives.Seems like they are reverting to back to primitive Neanderthals. They seem frustrated that the classics delay them from gratifying their immediate physical desires like a rapist ignores foreplay.

Yeah, dude! Who needs Shakespeare when you can read O’bongo al O’bongo: “Death to Whitey!” No doubt about it, “To be or not to be . . .” pales in comparison.
Actually, I feel some pity for these idiot scrunts who want to white-wash (pardon all the unintended puns) Western Civilization for some third-world excrement — you’ll never get to enjoy The Bard, Keats, Shelley, Lord Byron, et al.; your loss, fuck-heads!

No correction. Only another point of view which actually blends in with the slouching half of the faculty.

Unfortunately, your half is quite endangered thus proving that, at least in higher Ed faculty, devolution exists and is progressing at a fairly rapid rate. Proof lies in the cognitive deficiencies in the faculty caused by the shrinkage of the cerebrum and the Medulla Oblongata. External evidence is the periodic knee jerk reactions and intemperate screeching.

Yes, you’re speaking loud and clear, and what you’re saying tells any educators worth their tassels that you need to sit down, shut up, and learn your three R’s so you can become useful and productive.